Github announced that they will no longer support gem building on the site, and they recommend everyone switch to gemcutter. Some people are surprised and a little bit upset about the move, one of the complaints being that gemcutter doesn’t support forking like github.
Nick Quaranto has written about how gem forking can be done on gemcutter, by renaming the gem with your name appended to the gem name.

Gem Bundler is a utility for managing gem dependencies in your Rails projects. In Rails, it is a replacement for the config.gem lines that you currently put in your environment files. Gem Bundler allows you to manage your gem sources from the file and specifiy gems that are only required in certain environments.

DevIL is an image processing library that is fast and light weight. It has been around for quite some time, and the Ruby library for DevIL makes it a snap to use. John Mair has written up instructions on how to set up and use the Ruby DevIL library on his blog.

Engineyard has shared 5 client side performance observations on their blog. In the post they point out a few things that can really slow down your application, for instance forgetting to compress your stylesheets and javascripts using mod_deflate or another compressor.

Koen Van Der Auwera from 10-to-1 has written a gem that allows the creation of UML diagrams from the command line. The yUMLCMD gem allows you to generate UML png diagrams using the yUML.me text format right from the command line.

RailRoad is a Ruby script that analyzes the entirety of any Rails application and then outputs a graph description in the DOT language which can then be turned into an image. RailRoad can analyze your Rails application's models, controllers and even aasm state machines.

Remember, Ruby5 will be released Tuesday and Friday mornings, due to your feedback for consistent, morning releases. To stay informed about and active with this podcast, we encourage you to do one of the following:

This week we talk about stylesheet abstraction, testing named scopes, and storing logs in a database. Also, the WindyCity Rails videos are out, a new version of Spree has been released, and FiveRuns is no more.